Upgrade to the Flash 9 viewer for enhanced content, including the ability to browse & search through your favorite titles.
Click here to learn more!
Written by 
- Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
- Publisher: Vintage
- On Sale: February 4, 2003
- Price: $15.95
- ISBN: 978-0-375-70173-3 (0-375-70173-7)
about this book
William Lee Miller’s ethical biography is a fresh, engaging telling of the story of Lincoln’s rise to power. Through careful scrutiny of Lincoln’s actions, speeches, and writings, and of accounts from those who knew him, Miller gives us insight into the moral development of a great politician—one who made the choice to go into politics, and ultimately realized that vocation’s fullest moral possibilities.
As Lincoln’s Virtues makes refreshingly clear, Lincoln was not born with his face on Mount Rushmore; he was an actual human being making choices—moral choices—in a real world. In an account animated by wit and humor, Miller follows this unschooled frontier politician’s rise, showing that the higher he went and the greater his power, the worthier his conduct would become. He would become that rare bird, a great man who was also a good man. Uniquely revealing of its subject’s heart and mind, it represents a major contribution to our understanding and of Lincoln, and to the perennial American discussion of the relationship between politics and morality.
“Marvelous... Miller pursues [the] ever-intriguing interior Lincoln in his usual witty, reader-friendly, and conversational voice.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Compelling and readable.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Is it possible to say something new about Lincoln? The somewhat surprising answer, as William Lee Miller demonstrates in Lincoln’s Virtues, is yes.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A useful addition to the library of Lincoln books because it tackles a familiar subject from an unusual angle, giving appropriate centrality to Lincoln's moral convictions.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
